I did follow the story about the Cook Strait cluster of earthquakes close to Wellington, NZ. It was a 6.5 MMS quake with some strong aftershocks, enough to require checking buildings, rail lines, roads on soft soil, and the usual sorts of things following strong earthquakes anywhere on the Ring of Fire. Nobody was killed; nobody was reported as being seriously injured.

It was in a wholly different category from the Feb. 2011 Christchurch quake that badly damaged the centre and eastern suburbs of that South Island city, and also killed 185 people -- because of several local unfavourable factors, even though the temblor measured 'only' 6.0 MMS.

(MMS = moment magnitude scale, shown as M-sub-W, is the modern scientific replacement for the old Richter magnitude scale, shown as M-sub-L. Both are logarithmic scales and purport to measure total energy release. If someone just says a '6.9', odds are it's old-style Richter, which in general reads high. The Cook Strait main quake was 6.9 on the old M-sub-L Richter scale.)